Credit Suisse has come under fire for neglecting to fully investigate accusations that the bank had serviced Nazi clients and Nazi-linked accounts until as recently as 2020, according to a new US Senate committee investigation.
According to a press release from the Senate Budget Committee on Tuesday, which was also Holocaust Remembrance Day in the United States, Credit Suisse fired an independent Ombudsperson who oversaw a vast internal review and restricted the scope of its internal investigations. This left significant gaps in the forensic search for Nazi-linked records, the Senate Committee stated.
The bipartisan Senate investigation follows a March 2020 report by the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) that linked Credit Suisse accounts to a list of 12,000 Nazis in Argentina. Credit Suisse said at the time that an independent commission of experts had already thoroughly investigated the bank, but said it would look into the matter again.
In a statement on Tuesday, however, Credit Suisse said that they had conducted a two-year investigation into the claims made by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and found that "investigators found no evidence to support the SWC's allegations" about Nazi-linked bank accounts.
The bank said that a team of up to 50 professionals from independent consulting firm AlixPartners spent more than 50,000 hours investigating the matter using the bank's archives and databases.
The new Senate investigation centers around allegations made by Neil Barofsky, a lawyer from Jenner & Block hired in June 2021 to serve as an Ombudsperson and oversee the review of the bank's potential links to Nazi accounts.
Barofsky claims that the bank did not fully investigate links to Nazi supporters or the possibility that the bank may have financed escape routes used by Nazis, known as ratlines, to flee to other countries after the war. (more...)
Credit Suisse limited investigations into Nazi-linked accounts, Senate Committee alleges
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